This year’s crop of New Media Majors from the graduating class have created more than just a couple dozen outstanding capstone projects. By inventing startup companies based on cradle-to-cradle design and other local economies, many have envisioned a future for themselves in which earning a living is compatible with living sustainably. And some have businesses that are already taking off.
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Tags: capstone, education, New Media, orono, presentation, University of Maine
Still Water Senior Researchers John Bell and Craig Dietrich join Nicole Starosielski, Vanessa Vobis, and Jon Ippolito in the online presentation “Avoiding a Cultural Bottleneck: Networked, Distributed, and Agile Collaborations” as part of the HASTAC 2010: Grand Challenges and Global Innovations Conference. The projects presented include the Metaserver and other projects of Forging the Future.
Tags: Forging the Future, network, New Media, presentation, preservation, sharing, software, Still Water, variable media
“New Criteria for New Media” topped the list of the most downloaded article from MIT’s Leonardo Journal with 798 downloads as of this writing. This article by Joline Blais, Steve Evans, Jon Ippolito, Owen F. Smith, and Nathan Stormer proposes concrete new academic guidelines for evaluating scholarship in the digital age, and has garnered enormous attention from university researchers and administrators alike.
A pdf version can be downloaded from the MIT Press Web site. An interactive version of the article can be found at ThoughtMesh.net.
Tags: education, New Media, publication, research, Still Water, University of Maine
Still Water is pleased to announce the publication of 60: Innovators Shaping Our Creative Future, a landmark book on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of renowned art and design publishing house Thames & Hudson. Still Water co-directors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito penned the new media section of this book, which profiles five of the most innovative creators on the planet today.
These visionaries take the lessons learned from experiments in online communities and apply them to real-world problems, whether making cities sustainable, holding corporations accountable, or re-imagining laws that govern the flow of information. Included among these innovators are Maine’s own Miigam’agan and gkisedtanamoogk, Wabanaki elders who are building bridges between their ancestors’ lifeways and the 21st century.
“Every now and again along comes a book that acts as a cultural bookmark … Thames & Hudson’s new doorstopper Sixty is just such a book” — Grafik Magazine
“A collection of incredible, truly inspiring work from all over the world.” — The Design Files.
“Showcases the most creative minds in fashion, architecture, photography, green technology and science.” — New Scientist
“Fascinating insights into global projects that may predict future directions are presented here in an informative and visually appealing format.” — Library Journal
Tags: art, New Media, publication, Still Water
“Technology versus History”: A talk with Laura Barreca on Monday 30 November 4-5:30pm
Tags: art, education, europe, event, New Media, presentation, preservation, Still Water, University of Maine, variable media
For the first time, the New Media Department of the University of Maine is offering a course in Contagious Media–the use of the Internet, street performances, and other viral techniques for garnering recognition in the digital age.
After surveying some technical underpinnings of existing social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, the class examines techniques for splicing these networks together to disseminate viral concepts, or memes, for artistic or political ends.
Student projects have so far combined such technologies as blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as such low-tech strategies as flashmobs and launch parties. One particularly successful scheme involved printing the url for DearMaineStreet.com–a site designed to air feedback on dysfunctional course management software purchased by the university–on real maple leafs and then scattering them around campus. Photographs of these leaves, including the domain, made their way onto the front page of the Maine Campus newspaper and generated sufficient buzz to spike visitors to the Web site.
Many of these student projects will be on view at a “Contagious Idea” expo coming up in December. These include a class project to create a social network tailored to the New Media Department called NMDnet.
Tags: class, education, network, New Media, orono, sharing, Still Water, University of Maine
Now that we have over 250 students using The Pool regularly this term, Still Water senior researcher John Bell and co-director Jon Ippolito are happy to announce two improvements to accommodate the increased number of projects visible at any given time:
1. “Jump to subject” feature
Now when you visit the Pool home page and choose Jump In > Art Pool, you’ll be invited to choose a theme to filter by–such as audio or nmd205-2009–before you continue. This should make it easier for students working in particular classes to find each other’s work quickly.
Of course, you can still use the filters at the top of The Pool to refine your search, and bookmark the page so you easily return to the same set of filters.
2. Safari compatibility
The Pool is now compatible with Safari version 4 and above, so that users can use it with any of the three major browsers.
We welcome additional suggestions or comments on The Pool–please visit The Pool and select Learn More > Contact.
Tags: education, network, New Media, sharing, software, Still Water, The Pool, University of Maine
A variable media class in the New Media Department at the University of Maine this term introduces undergraduates to concepts of new media preservation and gives them hands-on experience with some of its tools.
The NMD205 syllabus includes a range of preservation strategies such as emulation, migration, and reinterpretation. As part of their coursework, students study technical vulnerabilities in well known new media artworks, resurrect an obsolete game using an emulator, and create new works based on reinterpreting or remixing works by other students in the class.
NMD205 students use The Pool to find works to remix and establish relationships among related works that can be tracked long after the course is over. This term U-Me students are joined in The Pool by students from UC-Santa Cruz, opening up their work to feedback from a wider range of participants.
ABOVE: Joe Raymond’s Linux Wars, a remix of the vintage game Space Invaders from NMD 205.
Tags: art, class, education, memory, network, New Media, orono, preservation, sharing, The Pool, University of Maine, variable media
A new University of Maine class in Life Art (NMD430/520) explores the boundaries of artistic collaboration by encouraging students to co-create with entire ecosystems of humans and other critters.
Life artists may :
- Crowd-source their artmaking with 10,000 earthworms.
- Get frogs to do their drawings for/with them.
- Create sculpture ‘for the birds’ so they can survive destroyed migratory paths across continents.
- Clone cruelty-free meat via the latest gene manipulation.
- Get Michelle Obama to “perform” their art piece.
- Plan an art opening with full course cross-species meals (eg for human and geese).
Student projects may draw from indigenous culture, digital culture, and/or permaculture, and will be featured in an exhibition at the end of the term. The course takes place at the Hutchinson Center in Belfast, Maine and is organized by Joline Blais in collaboration with Waterfall Arts and Unity College.
This New Media class is open to graduate students, qualified undergraduates, and members of the community. For more information, contact Joline Blais.
Tags: art, Belfast, class, GreenHouse, LongHouse, New Media, Still Water, sustainability, University of Maine, Wabanaki
The Pool, an online collaborative environment created by Still Water, has earned a headline story in Wired magazine, a feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and a demonstration at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. Yet with the exception of a semester-long experiment with students from UC-Berkeley in 2003, until this year The Pool’s audience has been almost exclusively students at the University of Maine.
This term, however, The Pool has become a lot more crowded, as students from two classes at the University of California at Santa Cruz join three U-Me classes in using this unusual software to bounce ideas off each other and receive feedback across the two campuses.
Athough divided across the east and west coast, the 250 students will be united by a common interface and timeline as they contribute intents, sketch approaches, build approaches, and offer feedback across classes and time zones. University of Maine professors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito will present a preliminary report of the testbed’s results at a conference organized by UC-Santa Cruz, The Art of Collaboration, on 23 October 2009.
More on the U-Me New Media Web site.
Tags: art, class, network, New Media, presentation, sharing, Still Water, The Pool, University of Maine
